I made it to this weekend’s Futuresonic Social Technologies Summit in the end, thanks to the lovely people over at the Manchester Digital Development Agency.

Thursday’s keynote by Toshio Iwai, a lead software developer at Nintendo and creator of Electroplankton, was one highlight – particularly his demonstration of his new digital musical instrument Tenori-On.

It’s a particularly visual handheld sample sequencer – anyone with a pair of hands could use it. Here’s Toshio playing it and here’s some more information about it. I’d love to get my hands on one but I’d hate to think how much one will cost…

The other highlight of the festival came from Last.fm’s Matt Ogle & Jonas Woost, who talked about the site’s development and their plans for the future.

They’re trialing a dating service, they said, and are interested in extending their service to include gig alerts by SMS, for example.

Someone questioned them about the commercial side of their business and they argued that their adverts are clearly marked.

They conceded that by sharing listening habits with record labels they are being a bit exploitative with user information, but pointed out that this is the price people choose to pay to enjoy customised radio and listener recommendations.

All in all, they seemed like good guys trying to do something useful and innovative with the internet.